Pilot Projects | Project Supplements

Principal Investigator: Eugene Hammel

Little is known about the effect of kinship network resources on the survival of the elderly in premodern societies. The usually accepted speculation holds that in such societies people have lots of kin, the elderly are revered, and that they are generously supported by them. Some less rosy views of the past have punctured such illusions, e.g. the work of Laslett in discussing the actual rarity of stem family organization in historical Western Europe, the turning out of indigent elderly by their children, and the work of Berkner in showing the hostility between fathers and succeeding sons as manifested in retirement contracts. The pilot tests the feasibility of estimating rigorously the effect in premodern societies of the number of kin of particular kinds on the chances of survival of the elderly. The data consist of approximately 200,000 parish records of baptisms, marriages, and burials from central Slavonia (Croatia), c. 1700-1900.